sounds like they are making a quad for each window and doing a similar effect but on a window by window basis. maybe tying in the type of rendered behind this window ect. You would get a more varied effect but it would be no where near as efficient as the method you have shown.

Ow, but that is very interesting! That is a very different take on my idea, interesting! I guess your algorithm is a lot faster per pixel. However, your algorithm is lineair (O(n)) in the number of windows rendered, while mine was constant time (O(1)).

I cannot run your demo, though: it misses dxgi.dll.

I am wondering to what extent your demo is pespectively correct, because a cubemap only takes into account ray direction and not ray origin.

Nice technique.
I remember seeing something similar in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, when you're walking on some fire escape ladders you can see interior maps through some windows. The map a flat texture that has both ceiling and floor. The color at the edges gets repeated if you look at it from extreme angles. Your approach looks a little better though.

I have come up with a nice new technique to suggest interiors in buildings: interior mapping. What the technique does, is smartly read from a ceiling-texture to show a ceiling behind windows. Here are some screenshots to show what I mean. This is a standard box, without any internal planes. It has a diffuse texture, cubemap reflections and interior mapping.

Wireframe:

Latest demo can be found further in this topic.

The technique requires one extra dependent read in the pixel shader and can be extended to also do interior walls and floors (right now the ceiling texture is just used as the floor as well). Doing walls, ceilings and floors would require four dependent texture reads, though, Architectural Companies in Dubaiso that is more expensive. I think this technique will be especially interesting for shooters in urban areas, where most choose to make the windows simply 100% reflective. This technique can suggest a lot more depth to the graphics.

Now I have never seen this technique used before, so I think I might have come up with something New, Cool and Fresh, but I do not know whether that is actually true. So I hope you folks can tell me whether this ahs been done before.

The idea comes from an effect a friend of mine, Ralph Rademakers, once noted in a game: the texture mapping was broken due to a bug and what he saw suggested interiors. He asked me whether it would be possible to do something like that on purpose and I came up with this. The math is really simple: the ray from camera to pixel is traced further in object space to ceilings on fixed heights. The height for the next ceiling is found using the floor()-function, so this allows an infinite number of ceilings at fixed distances without extra costs for the number of ceilings.

If this has not been done before, then I will experiment further with this technique, trying optimisations and further uses of this technique.

Cool technique.

I do think the look is a bit messy: I'm not entirely sure I would have understood what I was looking at if you hadn' told me.

That's probably mostly due to the art being programmer art. With better art and a proper context it would look a lot better. Also, this technique mostly shines in motion, as you can truly see the perspective then.